JPMorgan Chase Forms Team Focused on Helping Companies Raise Private Capital

JPMorgan Chase is reportedly forming a new team that will help companies raise private capital.

The Private Capital Advisory and Solutions team will connect investors with companies that are looking for private capital; advise clients on raising early stage equity, preferred stock and convertible bonds; and work on secondary funds and other ways for private equity firms to raise money, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday (Jan. 16).

“The private markets have just dwarfed the public markets lately,” Keith Canton, co-head of equity capital markets in the Americas, said in the report. “Historically, you only needed to think about an IPO or a sale as an exit. But there’s much more you can do in the middle.”

It was reported in May 2024 that JPMorgan Chase was moving deeper into the world of private credit and that its investment bank had set aside more than $10 billion for direct lending and was forming a partnership with asset managers to join it in private credit deals.

In February, it was reported that JPMorgan Chase had earmarked another $50 billion for its direct lending efforts as part of an effort to gain a greater foothold in the fast-growing private credit market.

At that time, the bank had over the previous four years deployed over $10 billion across more than 100 private credit transactions and worked with lending partners to allocate another $15 billion in private credit.

Other traditional lenders such as Wells Fargo and Citigroup were also scrambling to get a piece of the private credit market, which has traditionally been dominated by private capital providers, the February report said.

It was reported in January 2025 that the largest startups in the United States were raising so much capital in private markets that they could delay launching initial public offerings (IPOs).

Startups such as Databricks, SpaceX and OpenAI raised the billions of dollars they needed to continue growing and to enable employees to cash out stock options.

The trends toward private markets was driven in part by the willingness of some venture firms to invest many times more than the $100 million that used to be the most a firm would invest in a single startup, the January 2025 report said.